Hopefully this is not an unwelcome thread-drift-- I just want to register something I think is important to consider with songs like this. Which is, that the choruses can be considered to be unrelated to the solo lyrics and should be when exploring all options of how the songs developed.

My hypothesis -- which I can't prove and which I *can* argue but won't have the massive amount of time required to do it adequately! -- is that the chorus with "ranzo" came first. Only later was the morpheme "ranzo" taken from the chorus to form the name of a person who becomes the subject of the narrative.

Because of that, searching for "Ranzo" as the name of a person (in some speculations, a Portuguese, or a Jewish (!?) tailor, etc) may become a red herring.

I do feel compelled by Abrahams idea, which I mentioned above, that a paradigm (in the Levi-Strauss sense, ha) of someone being beaten by a superior shifted from a master-slave relationship to a captain-seaman relationship. Similarly compelling to me is the idea that some of the slave songs about being "sold off" to another plantation and being separated from family had their paradigms substituted so as to tell the tale of a sailor going across the sea being separated from home/beloved. Continuity of the "superior beats inferior" could be passed on without the "surface" elements of the inferior being called Ranzo, his being a tailor, etc.

I think the choruses are their own animal, in which certain sound formations were salient.

I think these sound formations, chorus phrases, popular morphemes -- whatever you want to call them -- transformed not only through oral transmission over time (ie "the folk process"). I theorize, further, that the transfer across cultural borders caused them to change.

If, as I subscribe to, a body of repertoire was transferred from an African American community to others outside of that community, then the "outsiders" would not understand everything they heard. The Irish, German, Scots, English men you found themselves, say, with a cotton jackscrew in their hands and tasked to acculturate to singing songs in the manner of an African American community that had been the sole practitioners of cotton screwing for decades before they arrived, would essentially be creating mondegreens as they learned the songs and attempted to parse unfamiliar phrases.

I've shared this view often in the case of "Shenandoah," where my hypothesis is that singings may not have been singing, originally, of "Shenandoah" (the river, the valley) but rather something else that later singers rationalized as the word "Shenandoah". From there, supposing that the word is Shenandoah, creators of solo lyrics would riff on lines that related to the Shenandoah (as opposed to "Sally Brown" or whatever chimera formed the object of longing in the paradigm of love and separation). I realize that that example is a tough one to argue convincingly.

As simpler example is "Hilo," wherein we know that the morpheme "hi-lo" (holler? hollow? etc) was a feature of the choruses of numerous plantation songs. In the hands of Davis and Tozer (and maybe working sailors), lacking the full understanding that "hilo" was simply a "chorus word", it was rationalized as a place, and the solo line is created, "Hilo town is in Peru"!

So, I suspect as well that "ranzo" was part of a chorus phrase that was rationalized as the name "Ranzo", whence later singers made Ranzo the name of the subject of the narrative in solo lyrics.

I think it's possible that several choruses are mixed up in this way. Some singers were supposed to have sung "Highland day" while we find elsewhere "Island day." There's "Hooker John" (a chanty noted by Hugill) on one hand and "hoojun" in other songs (which, possibly related, is among the variants of the mysterious word "hoosier" [probably a term for a rustic/redneck White working class fellow, in Black dialect) which after Hugill is sought out as a kind of boat!

I'm intrigued by the possibilities of choral phrases like "Lowlands away" and "Maringo." "Lowlands away" appears as "Lowlands a-RAY" in Alden's article, which I think is an article of such quality that I'm not prepared to dismiss the "ray" part as random. What about the chorus of "ranzo, ranzo, ray"? When I sing "lowlands a-ray" it sounds like "low ranzo ray." When I sing "Stormy's gone" it sounds like "Tommy's gone" with an S in front of it. (There's a recording of Caribbean singers who mix Tommy and Stormy in the same song.) "hilo my ranzo ray" -- "fire ma-ringo fire away." Is "maringo" really a thing, or is it "MY ringo"? I have a steamboat loading song I transcribed at the Library of Congress from a recording. It's recognizable as the "Bully Boat / Ranzo ranzo ray" song but the singer is clearly singing "rango". Is "rango" a variation of "ranzo" (it would seem to be in this context) that could lead us to "maringo" (my rango)?

I suppose all this is to say that "juranzo" and "juranzie" are pregnant with possibilities -- surely the listeners in the two accounts had no idea what they were hearing and "juranzo" was only their best attempt to transcribe the sound -- that compel me not to seek "ranzo" as a narrative character's name nor, necessarily as an independent word. Add to that the fact that "ranzo" occurs in songs that don't contain Reuben's narrative; it could have an independent existence.

The Chenault reference ("juranzie) is something I read in Abrahams and then followed up with the source. Then, with the clue of "ju-", I started searching with different spellings to find "juranzo" (the Richardson account).

Back to the thread: I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not inclined to put too much stock in the narrative of Reuben up to a point. We may locate the approximate point by which singers started to apply the Reuben narrative to a ~ranzo chorus (after which, it solidified and continued), whereas other aspects of the song may have had a more obscure life before the Reuben narrative was created.